Why we show completion rate instead of a fitness score

Most training platforms will give you a number for your fitness. It goes up when you train, down when you rest, and it feels like insight. Soigneur does not have one, and that was a decision rather than an omission.

What those numbers actually are

A fitness score is a model. It takes your training load, applies a decay curve, and produces a value in a unit that does not exist outside the software that made it. The models are not worthless — the shape of the curve is often directionally right. But they carry two problems that get quietly ignored.

The first is that the input is usually a single load figure per session, which throws away most of what made the session what it was. Ninety minutes easy and ninety minutes of threshold work can land in the same place depending on how the number is calculated.

The second is that the output invites you to trust a precision that is not there. When the number says 61.4, nothing about your body knows the difference between that and 59.

The question underneath

When an athlete looks at a fitness score, they are usually trying to answer something simpler: am I doing the work I said I would do?

That question has an honest answer. Sessions completed against sessions planned. Minutes trained against minutes scheduled. No model, no invented unit, nothing to argue with.

It is also the question a coach can act on. “Your fitness dropped four points” leads nowhere. “You have missed the last three Tuesday sessions” leads to a conversation about Tuesdays.

What we show instead

Over four, eight or twelve weeks: how many sessions were planned, how many were completed, the percentage, and the minutes. That is it.

It is less exciting than a curve. It is considerably harder to argue with, and in our experience the athletes who are honest about that number are the ones who improve.

Where this might change

If we ever add a load model, it will sit alongside the counts rather than replacing them, and it will say plainly what it is modelling. Depth here — the full fitness, fatigue and form treatment — is explicitly not on the v1 roadmap. We would rather ship a small honest thing than a large confident one.